The updated versions will enable healthcare organizations to meet the anticipated challenges associated with Healthcare Reform - such as rising operational costs and a growing patient population - by easily customizing workflow changes through new enterprise management functionality. Administrative users of NCR MediKiosk will be able to quickly and easily roll out tasks that are traditionally time consuming, such as authentication criteria, clinical and consent forms, demographic and insurance updates, payment options, and insurance and ID card scanning functionality. The new NCR MediKiosk also offers enhanced privacy and patient safety features through the addition of palm vein biometric enrollment and authentication, which identifies patients based on vein patterns that are unique to each individual’s palm.

The same enterprise management tools are now available in the NCR Patient Portal solution, which allows administrative users to quickly and easily deploy online pre-registration, appointment request, scheduling, bill pay, eForms and personal health records. The new portal version also improves the patient’s ability to communicate with caregivers through secure messaging, eVisits, and result delivery tools.

“Providing healthcare organizations with this functionality is extremely important as they are faced with regulatory changes that require immediate action,” said Jeff Kao, vice president and general manager for NCR Healthcare. “For example, the FDA recently stated that informed consent be secured from high-risk patients receiving intravenous gadolinium, a contrast dye given during MRIs. In situations like this, hospitals and health systems must draft the form, print it out for each patient to sign, and then scan the document. This can be a burdensome, time-consuming task; however, with these important updates to our self-service technology, electronic consent forms can immediately be pushed out to the check-in kiosks and patient portals, addressing requirements in a fast and more convenient way.”

By automating and facilitating the necessary and frequent changes to routine patient transactions, healthcare providers can minimize the time and costs associated with completing and scanning paper-based forms, and facilitate integration of the electronic form and other patient data into their EHR in real time. For multi-site organizations or those that need to manage workflow by department, the enterprise management capabilities also provide a hierarchical structure to segment by organization or department based on each one’s specific needs.

“By studying and leveraging self-service workflow processes that have worked successfully for our numerous hospital, health system, medical group and retail health clients, we’ve implemented meaningful updates in our self-service technology, making it extremely customizable and user-friendly,” Kao said. “This approach, which leverages a single web-enabled platform and database, will allow our existing and future customers to expand their self-service functionality and better serve their patients with just a few simple clicks.”

NCR will display NCR MediKiosk, NCR Patient Portal and NCR Mobile Healthcare Solutions at booth #2805 during the HIMSS11 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Orlando, Fla., February 20-24. The NCR booth will also give visitors the opportunity to walk through various settings—including at home, at the provider office and on the go—so they can see how self-service can be used in those situations to improve the patient experience.
About NCR Corporation

NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR) is a global technology company leading how the world connects, interacts and transacts with business. NCR’s assisted- and self-service solutions and comprehensive support services address the needs of retail, financial, travel, healthcare, hospitality, entertainment, gaming and public sector organizations in more than 100 countries. NCR (www.ncr.com) is headquartered in Duluth, Georgia.

NCR is a trademark of NCR Corporation in the United States and other countries.

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